The Other Mrs.

by Mary Kubica

  And there it is, sketched with pencil on a sheet of notebook paper this time: the dismembered body, the woman, the knife, the blood. Otto’s artwork, the same picture I’ve been finding around the house.

  I tell her, “I didn’t draw that. My son drew that.”

  But she says, “No.”

  She has a different theory about who drew this picture. She claims that the child alter inside of me drew it. I laugh out loud at the absurdity of that, because if some child alter living inside of me drew it, then what she’s saying is that I drew this picture. That I drew the pictures in the attic, in the hallway, and left them around the house for myself to find.

  I did not draw this picture. I did not draw any of the pictures.

  I’d remember if I did.

  I tell her, “I didn’t draw this picture.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” she said, and for a split second I think she believes me. Until she says, “Not you specifically. Not Sadie Foust. What happens with DID is that your personality gets fragmented. It gets split. Those fragments form distinct identities, with their very own name, appearance, gender, age, handwriting, speech patterns, more.”

  “What’s her name, then?” I challenge. “If you spoke to her. If you drew pictures with her. Then what’s her name?”

  “I don’t know. She’s shy, Sadie. These things take time,” she says.

  “How old is she?” I ask.

  “She’s six years old.”

  She tells me that this child likes to color and draw. She likes to play with dolls. She has a game she likes to play, which this woman played with her in an effort to get her to open up. Play therapy, this woman tells me. In this very room, they held hands and spun in circles. When they were both as dizzy as could be, they stopped. They froze in place like statues.

  “The statue game, she called it,” this woman tells me, because they held still like statues until one of them finally toppled over.

  I try to imagine what she’s telling me. I picture this child spinning in circles with this woman, except the child alter—if I’m to believe her—is not a child. It’s me.

  It makes me blush to think of it. Me, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, holding hands and spinning around this room with another grown woman, freezing in place like statues.

  The idea is absurd. I can’t stand to entertain it.

  Not until Tate’s words come rushing back to me: Statue game, statue game! and it strikes a nerve.

  Mommy is a liar! You do know what it is, you liar.

  “On average, those with DID have around ten alters living within them,” she tells me. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes as many as one hundred.”

  “How many do I supposedly have?” I ask. Because I don’t believe her. Because this is just some elaborate scam to besmirch my name, my character, making it easier for me to take the fall for Morgan’s murder.

  “So far I’ve met two,” she says.

  “So far?”

  “There may be more.” She goes on to say, “Dissociative identity disorder often begins with a history of abuse at a young age. The alternate personalities form as a coping mechanism. They serve different purposes, like protecting the host. Standing up, speaking up for the host. Harboring the painful memories.”

  As she says it, I think of myself, harboring parasites. I think of the oxpecker bird, who eats bugs off the backs of hippos. A symbiotic relationship, once thought, until scientists realized the oxpeckers were actually vampire birds, digging holes to drink the blood of the hippopotamuses.

  Not so symbiotic after all.

  She says, “Tell me about your childhood, Dr. Foust.”

  I tell her I can’t remember much of my childhood, nearly nothing, in fact, until I was around eleven years old.

  She just looks at me, saying nothing, waiting for me to put it together.

  Are you prone to periods of blackouts, Dr. Foust?

  But blackouts are temporary losses of time, caused by things like alcohol consumption, epileptic seizures, low blood sugar.

  I didn’t black out for the extent of my young childhood. I just don’t remember.

  “That’s typical in cases of DID,” she tells me after a while. “The dissociation is a way to disconnect from a traumatic experience. A coping mechanism,” she says again, as if she didn’t just say that moments ago.

  “Tell me about this woman,” I say. I’m trying to catch her in a lie. Certainly sooner or later she’ll contradict herself. “This Camille woman.”

  She tells me there are different types of alters. Persecutor alters, protector alters, more. She has yet to ascertain which this young woman is. Because sometimes she stands up for me, but more often her portrayals of me are hate-filled. She’s huffy, ticked off. Angry and aggressive. It’s a love-hate relationship. She hates me. She also wants to be me.

  The little girl doesn’t know I exist.

  “Officer Berg took the liberty of doing some research,” she says. “Your mother died in childbirth, no?” she asks, and I say that yes, she did. Preeclampsia. My father never spoke of it, but by the way his eyes got glossy whenever her name came up, I knew it had been horrific for him. Losing her, raising me alone.

  “When you were six, your father remarried,” she says, but I object to this.

  “No, he didn’t,” I say. “It was just my father and me.”

  “You said you don’t remember your childhood, Doctor,” she reminds me, but I tell her what I do remember: being eleven years old, my father and me living in the city, him taking the train to work, coming home fifteen, sixteen hours later, drunk.

  “I remember,” I say, though I don’t remember what came before this, but I’d like to believe it was always the same.

  She pulls paperwork from her briefcase, telling me that the year I was six years old, my father married a woman by the name of Charlotte Schneider. We lived in Hobart, Indiana, and my father worked as a sales rep for a small company. Three years later, when I was nine, my father and Charlotte divorced. Irreconcilable differences.

  “What can you tell me about your stepmother?” she asks, and I tell her, “Nothing. You’re mistaken. Officer Berg is mistaken. There was no stepmother. It was only my father and me.”

  She shows me a photograph. My father, me and some strange but beautiful woman standing before a home I don’t know. The house is small, just one and a half stories tall. It’s nearly engulfed in trees. In the drive is a car. I don’t recognize it.

  My father looks younger than I remember him, more handsome, more alive. He stares sideways at the woman, his eyes not meeting the camera lens. His smile is authentic, which strikes me as odd. My father was a man who didn’t often smile. In the image, he has a full head of dark hair and is without all the sawtooth lines that later took over his eyes and cheeks.

  My father had a nickname for me when I was a girl. Mouse, he called me. Because I was one of those twitchy, tic-prone kids, always wrinkling my nose up, like a mouse.

  “I showed this picture earlier today. It didn’t sit well with the child alter, Sadie. It made her run to the corner of the room, begin scribbling furiously on paper. She drew this,” she says, holding the drawing up, showing it to me again. The dismembered body, the blob of blood.

  “Around the time you were ten years old, your father filed for an order of protection against your stepmother. He sold your home in Indiana, moved with you to Chicago. He started a new career, at a department store. Do you remember this?” she asks, but I don’t. Not all of it, anyway.

  “I need to get back to my family,” I tell her instead. “They must be worried about me. They must wonder where I am,” but she says that my family knows where I am.

  I picture Will, Otto and Tate in our home without me. I wonder if the snow relented, if ferry traffic resumed, if Will made it home in time to pick Tate up from school.

&n
bsp; I think of Otto at home when the police arrived to collect the washcloth, the knife.

  “Is my son here? Is my son Otto here?” I ask, wondering if I’m even at the public safety building anymore or if they’ve taken me elsewhere.

  I look around. I see a windowless room, a wall, two chairs, the floor.

  There’s no way to know where I am.

  I ask the woman, “Where am I? When can I go home?”

  “I just have a few more questions,” she says. “If you’ll bear with me, we’ll get you out of here soon. When you arrived at the station, you told Officer Berg there was a bloody washcloth in your home, along with a knife.”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “that’s right.”

  “Officer Berg sent someone to your home. The property was thoroughly searched. Neither item was there.”

  “They’re mistaken,” I say, voice elevating, my blood pressure spiking as a headache forms between my eyes, a dull, achy pain, and I press on it, watching as the room around me begins to drift in and out of focus. “I saw them both. I know for certain they’re there. The police didn’t look hard enough,” I insist because I know I’m right about this. The washcloth and the knife were there. I didn’t imagine them.

  “There’s more, Dr. Foust,” she tells me. “Your husband gave the police permission to search your home. They found Mrs. Baines’s missing cell phone there. Can you tell us how it came to be in your home, or why you didn’t turn it in to the police?”

  “I didn’t know it was there,” I say defensively. I shrug my shoulders, tell her I can’t explain. “Where did they find it?” I ask, feeling hopeful that the answers to Morgan’s murder are there on her phone.

  “They found it, oddly enough, charging on your fireplace mantel.”

  “What?” I ask, aghast. Then I remember the dead phone. The one I assumed was Alice’s.

  “We asked your husband. He said he didn’t put it there. Did you put the cell phone on the mantel, Dr. Foust?” she asks.

  I tell her I did.

  “What were you doing with Mrs. Baines’s cell phone?” she asks, and this I can explain, though it sounds so unbelievable as I say it, telling her how I found Morgan’s cell phone in my bed.

  “You found Mrs. Baines’s phone in your bed? Your husband told the police you’re the jealous type. That you’re mistrustful. That you’re intolerant of him speaking to other women.”

  “That’s not true,” I snap, angry that Will would say these things of me. Every time I accused him of cheating, it was with good reason.

  “Were you jealous of your husband’s relationship with Mrs. Baines?”

  “No,” I say, but that’s of course a lie. I was somewhat jealous. I was insecure. After Will’s history, I had every right to be. I try to explain this to her. I tell her about Will’s past, about his affairs.

  “Did you think your husband and Mrs. Baines were having an affair?” she asks, and I did, truth be told, think that. For a time I did. But I never would have acted on it. And now I know that it wasn’t an affair they were having, but something that went deeper than that. Will and Morgan had a bond, a connection, to his former fiancée. The one he claimed he didn’t love any more than me. But somehow, I think he did.

  I reach across the table, take ahold of her hands and say, “You have to believe me. I didn’t do anything to hurt Morgan Baines.” She pulls her hands away.

  I feel disembodied then. I watch on as another me sits slumped in a chair, speaking to a woman. “I do believe you, Dr. Foust. I do. I don’t think Sadie did this,” the woman says, though her voice comes to me muffled as if I’m slipping away, drowning in water, before the room drops entirely from sight.

  WILL

  They let me into the room. Sadie is there. She sits on a chair with her back to me. Her shoulders slump forward; her head is in her hands. From the back side, she looks to be about twelve years old. Her hair is matted down to her head; her pajamas are on.

  I tread lightly. “Sadie?” I gently ask because maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. Until I get a good look at her, I never know who she is. The physical characteristics don’t change. There’s always the brown hair and eyes, the same trim figure, the same complexion and nose. The change is in her demeanor, in her bearing. It’s in her posture: in the way she stands and walks. It’s in the way she talks, her word choice and pitch. It’s in her actions. If she’s aggressive or demure, a killjoy or crass, easy or high-strung. If she comes on to me or if she cowers in a corner, crying out like a little girl for her daddy every time I touch her.

  My wife is a chameleon.

  She looks at me. She’s wrecked. She’s got tears in her eyes, which is how I know she’s either the kid or she’s Sadie. Because Camille would never cry.

  “They think I killed her, Will.”

  Sadie.

  Sadie’s voice is panicked when she speaks. She’s being hypersensitive as always. She rises from the chair, comes to me, attaches herself to me. Arms around my neck, getting all clingy, which ordinarily Sadie doesn’t do. But she’s desperate now, thinking I’ll do her bidding for her as I always do. But not this time.

  “Oh, Sadie,” I say, stroking her hair, being amenable as always. “You’re shaking,” I say, pulling away, keeping her at an arm’s length.

  I’ve got empathy down to a science. Eye contact, active listening. Ask questions, avoid judgment. I could do it in my sleep. It never hurts to cry a little, too.

  “My God,” I say. I let go of her hands long enough to reach for the tissue I put in my pocket before, the one with enough menthol to make myself cry. I dab it at my eyes, put it back in my pocket, let the waterworks begin. “Berg will rue the day he did this to you. I’ve never seen you so upset,” I tell her, cupping her face in my hands, taking her in. “What did they do to you?” I ask.

  Her voice is screechy when it comes. She’s panicking. I see it in her eyes. “They think I killed Morgan. That I did it because I was jealous of you and her. I’m not a killer, Will,” she says. “You know that. You have to tell them.”

  “Of course, Sadie. Of course I will,” I lie, always her Johnny-on-the-spot. Always. It gets old. “I’ll tell them,” I say, though I won’t. I’m not convinced of the need to commit obstruction of justice for her, though Sadie, herself, could never kill. That’s where Camille comes in handy.

  Truth be told, I like Camille more than Sadie. The first time she manifested herself for me, I thought Sadie was yanking my chain. But no. It was real. And almost too good to be true. Because I’d discovered a vivacious, untamable woman living inside my wife, one I was more smitten with than the woman I married. It was like discovering gold in a mine.

  There’s a whole metamorphosis that happens. I’ve been at this long enough that I know when it’s happening. I just never know who I’ll get when the mutation takes place, if I’ll wind up with a butterfly or a frog.

  “You have to believe me,” she begs.

  “I do believe you, Sadie.”

  “I think they’re trying to frame me,” she says. “But I have an alibi, Will. I was with you when she was killed. They’re blaming me for something I didn’t do!” she yells as I go to her, hold her pretty little head in my hands and tell her everything will be all right.

  She recoils then, remembering something.

  “Berg said you called him,” she says. “He said you called him and took back what you said about that night. He says you said I wasn’t with you after all. That I walked the dogs. That you didn’t know where I’d gone. You lied, Will.”

  “Is that what they told you?” I ask, aghast. I let my mouth drop, my eyes go wide. I shake my head and say, “They’re lying, Sadie. They’re telling lies, trying to pit us against each other. It’s a tactic. You can’t believe anything they say.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Morgan was Erin’s sister?” she asks, changing tack. “You kept that
from me. I would have understood, Will. I would have understood your need to connect with someone Erin loved if only you’d have told me. I would have supported that,” she says, and it’s laughable, really. Because I thought Sadie was smarter than this. She hasn’t put two and two together.

  I didn’t need to connect with Morgan. I needed to disconnect. I didn’t know she lived on the island when we moved here. If I did, we wouldn’t have come.

  Imagine my surprise when I saw her for the first time in ten years. I could have let it go, too. But Morgan couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

  She threatened to snitch. To tell Sadie what I’d done. The picture of Erin she left for Sadie to find. I found it first, put it in the last place I expected Sadie to look. It was just my luck that she did.

  Morgan was a stupid kid the night I took Erin’s life. She heard us fighting because Erin had fallen for some dick when she was off at school. She came home to break the engagement off. She tried to give me the ring back. Erin had only been gone a couple of months, but by winter break she was high and mighty already. She thought she was better than me. A sorority girl while I was still living at home, going to community college.

  Morgan tried to tattle, to tell everyone she heard us fighting the night before, but no one was going to believe a ten-year-old over me. And I played the role of the distraught boyfriend quite well. I was heartbroken as could be. And no one yet knew Erin had been seeing someone new. She only told that to me.

  The evidence—the storm, the icy patches on the street, the lack of visibility—was also insurmountable that night. I’d taken precautions. When they found her, there were no external signs of violence. No signs of a struggle. Asphyxiation is extremely difficult to detect. They didn’t do a tox screen either, on account of the weather conditions. No one considered that Erin might’ve died because of a shitload of Xanax in her system, because of hypoxia, because of a plastic bag strapped down over her head. The cops didn’t. They didn’t think once about the way I pulled the bag from her head when she was dead; how I moved Erin’s body to the driver’s seat, shifted the car into Drive, watched her corpse take a ride into the pond before I walked the rest of the way home, grateful for the snow that covered my tracks. No, they thought only of the icy road, of Erin’s lead foot, of the indisputable fact that she swerved off the road and into the freezing water—which was quite disputable after all. Because that’s not the way it happened.